Tech Talent Concentrations

Recently the Austin Technology Council released a new report on tech talent (Edit 2017: link broken.) It focuses on the sector’s expected strong growth, a potentially emerging skills gap* between what employers say they need and the skills potential job candidates have, and also whether the supply of such workers can keep up with demand. The report is filled with good nuggets of information, including this chunk from the intro, which many folks across the country say is true, all you need to do is change the city name.

While tax incentives and ribbon cuttings tend to dominate headlines about economic development, it’s availability of skilled labor that usually drives corporate location decisions, especially for tech companies relying on highly skilled workers to drive innovation and market share. Austin’s strong economic growth and renowned quality of life are attracting people from around the U.S. and the world. But the future of Austin’s tech industry also depends on the region’s ability to prepare local residents for high-skill, high-demand job opportunities.

While the report benchmarks Austin to other major tech metros, that list did not include Portland. To that end, I went and examined the core 19 tech occupations, as listed in the report — computer systems analysts, software developers, programmers, etc — for the ten metros included in the report in addition to Portland and the U.S. overall. The results are shown below. Total tech employment, which includes office and sales staff for example, is obviously larger than this, but the following represents those core, fundamental occupations and skill sets. In short, Portland’s share of all jobs in tech occupations is both significantly above the national average but also significantly below the most tech-heavy metros.

The group above includes some of America’s largest and most productive metropolitan areas, so it is no surprise to find that these metros are home to 1 out of every 8 U.S. jobs (12.5%.) What is somewhat surprising is the degree to which tech clusters. These same 11 metros are home to 1 out of every 4 U.S. tech jobs (25%.) That’s quite an amazing statistic.

It’s important to keep in mind, as the ATC report notes, that not all of these jobs are truly tech jobs. In Austin, about 1/3 of these are in non-tech industries (universities, government, R&D, etc). Even so, the labor/talent pool from which employers draw is the same. Tech firms must compete with non-tech firms for the same type of workers and skills. Even if your region is not tech-heavy, having a large number of such skilled workers in non-tech industries is still a boon for economic growth and innovation moving forward.

While Portland may rank a notch below the best known and largest tech hubs in the country, it is just a notch and not a giant step down. Across the 50 largest MSAs in the country, Portland’s tech concentration ranks 14th highest. The full rankings and shares are shown below. Note: Durham-Chapel Hill drops off the list.

These findings are similar to our office’s previous work examining high-tech across states, where Oregon ranked 14th highest, a step above the national average. A few key points from our previous work:

However it is important to think about what types of technology we actually have here in Oregon, compared with what other sub-sectors are concentrated more heavily in other locations. For example, we know that Oregon has a higher concentration of manufacturing high-technology with the presence of Tektronix (more historically) and Intel (more recently), and the like.

Even though Oregon does well directly on software, in this broader context of software that includes most of the other non-manufacturing sub-sectors, Oregon ranks 27th highest and below the U.S. average. On the hardware side, Oregon ranks above average and 7th highest among all states. Since the fallout of the 2001 recession, Oregon’s relative position in high-tech is largely unchanged year to year. If one dives a little deeper into the data, Oregon does rank 1st for semiconductors.

[…] the other week. However that’s due to high-tech being a much bigger industry in the Bay Area than it is here in Portland and Oregon more broadly. Even as Oregon high-tech job growth has been solid in recent years, in […]

[…] the next downturn, or will the workers leave when the jobs dry up? We know that Portland’s tech talent cluster is both significantly above the U.S. average but below the country’s largest tech centers. […]

[…] recent years. Jobs, wages, venture capital and the like continue to be heavily concentrated in the existing tech hubs. Among other metros across the country, Jed does find that the Portland region’s mix of tech […]

Please provide a new link to the Austin Technology Council report. The existing link is broken. IMO this content suggests the appreciation in home values has been disproportionate to the underlying growth in tech jobs.

Thanks for the heads up. You’re right the link isn’t working and I can’t seem to find it quickly on their site. The post is a couple years old now, and it’s possible they’ve redone their site since then which could break links. Sorry about that.

As for home values it’s hard to say. We know we’ve fundamentally underbuilt housing in the past 8 years. High-wage jobs have lead the recovery and expansion both in absolute terms and in terms of % increases. So we have a lot more households with higher incomes who can afford to pay higher prices. Tech is a piece of that, but depending upon where you are in the country it’s obviously a bigger piece than in other areas. In Oregon, high-tech jobs remain a steady share of all jobs. They’ve seen good growth, yes, but not above average growth. And again, focusing just on the jobs/incomes is a demand side story. And demand is back and the ability to pay is higher today for a lot of households, although not all of course. However the biggest housing issue in recent years has been the supply side of the market. We’re just not building enough units to match demand. Here’s our summary of the housing supply side constraints:https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2017/04/12/causes-of-the-great-housing-shortage/